Is Apify worth the price?
Apify Free tier gives you $5/month in platform credits, enough to run small scraping jobs and test Actors.
Starter at $49/month includes $49 in platform credits plus proxy access, making it effectively the real entry point for production use. Scale at $499/month targets teams running large crawls with $499 in credits, priority support, and team collaboration.
The credit-based model means you pay for what you use (compute, storage, proxy bandwidth), but costs can be unpredictable, a single misconfigured Actor can burn through credits in hours. Compared to building your own scraping infrastructure (Puppeteer + proxy rotation + queue management + storage), Apify saves weeks of engineering time at the cost of per-job pricing.
Pricing Plans
Free
- $5 platform credits/month
- Access to Actor store
- Basic scraping
- Community support
Starter
$39/monthly
- More compute credits
- Scheduled runs
- Email support
- API access
Team
$199/monthly
- Team collaboration
- Higher limits
- Priority support
- Actor development
Business
$999/monthly
- Enterprise-scale scraping
- Custom Actors
- Dedicated support
- SLA
Hidden Costs & Gotchas
Platform credits are consumed by compute (Actor runs), storage (datasets, key-value stores), and proxy bandwidth, all three meters run simultaneously
Residential proxy traffic costs significantly more credits per GB than datacenter proxies, scraping sites with aggressive bot detection drains credits fast
Actor compute is billed per compute unit (1 CU = 1 GB RAM x 1 hour). Browser-based scrapers (Puppeteer/Playwright) use 4-10x more CUs than HTTP-based ones
Storage costs accumulate if you do not clean up datasets, old crawl results are retained and billed until deleted
Pre-built Actors from the marketplace may have per-result pricing set by their authors on top of your platform credit consumption
Monthly credit allocation does not roll over, unused credits from your plan expire at the end of the billing cycle
Enterprise pricing is fully custom and typically starts at $2,000+/month for high-volume scraping operations
Which Plan Do You Need?
Teams that need production-grade web scraping without managing proxy infrastructure, browser farms, or anti-bot bypasses
Developers who want pre-built scrapers (Actors) for common sites, Amazon, Google, Instagram, LinkedIn, without writing code
Organizations requiring scheduled scraping jobs with automatic retries, storage, and webhook integrations
AI/ML teams collecting training data at scale that need rotating proxies and CAPTCHA solving built in
Our Recommendation
solo
Free tier ($5 credits/month) is enough for testing and small personal projects. Starter ($49/month) when you need reliable scheduled scraping. Monitor credit usage closely in the first month to understand your burn rate.
startup
Starter or Scale depending on volume. For under 10,000 pages/day, Starter ($49/month) is usually sufficient. For larger crawls, evaluate Crawlee (free, self-hosted) before committing to Scale ($499/month), you may save 80% by running your own infrastructure.
enterprise
Scale or Enterprise for high-volume operations. Negotiate custom pricing for predictable monthly spend. Consider a hybrid approach: Apify for complex sites with bot protection, Scrapy/Crawlee self-hosted for simpler sites to reduce credit consumption.
How Apify Compares to Competitors
Scrapy is free and battle-tested for HTTP scraping but lacks built-in browser support and proxy management.
Crawlee (by Apify) is the open-source alternative with Playwright built in, same quality, no platform cost. Bright Data has superior proxy infrastructure but is primarily a proxy provider, not a scraping platform. Apify best value when you need the full managed platform: pre-built Actors, scheduling, storage, and proxy in one place.
Apify Pricing FAQ
How much does Apify cost?
Apify starts at $0/month on the Free plan. It offers 4 paid tiers ranging from $0/month up to $999/month.
Does Apify have a free plan?
Apify does not offer a permanent free plan. Paid plans are required from day one.
What is the cheapest Apify paid plan?
The cheapest paid plan for Apify is "Free" at $0/month. Key features include: $5 platform credits/month, Access to Actor store, Basic scraping.
Is there a cheaper alternative to Apify?
Yes. Popular alternatives to Apify include ScrapingBee, Bright Data, Scrapy, Puppeteer. Free alternatives include ScrapingBee, Scrapy, Puppeteer. Compare them side-by-side on Toolradar.
Cheaper alternatives to Apify
5 of 6 direct competitors below offer a free plan. Per-seat pricing varies up to 60% across this set.
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